Road infrastructure planning in Kalimantan, Indonesia

A few examples of planned/ongoing road and railway development projects: • Trans Kalimantan (385 km) • Road development from Kotawaringin to the mills (116 km), Central Kalimantan • Pangkalan Bun development (58.5 Km), Central Kalimantan • Development of Ketapang Road and mills facility (67.6 km), Central Kalimantan • Simpang Tiga Apas-Simanggaris (78 km), East Kalimantan • Sosok – Tayan (46km), West Kalimantan • Tanjung – Batas Kota Sanggau (39 km), West Kalimantan • Singkawang – Tebas (43 km), West Kalimanta

Ecosystem services from small-scale forestry: a comparative analysis

Ecosystem services are the benefits community derive from ecosystems. Uninterrupted supply of ecosystem services is an essential requirement for sustainable development, strong linkages between community wellbeing and ecosystem services having been identified. Although a growing number of research papers on ecosystem services assessment can be found, most of them focus on natural forests ecosystems. The capacity of small-scale forestry to supply ecosystem services has largely been ignored. This paper spatially assesses the capacity of small-scale forest restoration plantations to supply ecosystem services, and compares these with rainforests and sclerophyll forests in the Wet Tropics of Far North Queensland, Australia. The Wet Tropics consists of a landscape dominating by rainforests and sclerophyll forests, including the world largest rainforests World Heritage Area. Small-scale restoration plantations are designed to establishing ecological connectivity. Data on forest vegetation have been collected from 66 plots of 0.05 ha area distributed over rainforests, sclerophyll forests and restoration plantations, and spatially analysed. The supply of some ecosystem services including global climate regulation, air quality regulation and habitat provision from small­ scale forests is found to be comparable with rainforests and sclerophyll forests. This study has policy implications for environmental decision-making focusing on ecosystem service supply from small-scale forestry

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM) SUCCESS FACTORS: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

Customer relationship management (CRM) can improve organization’s performance through applying customer knowledge and maintaining relationships with customers. Literature on CRM in an integrative fashion is sparse, rather issues are presented in isolation mostly focusing on technology ignoring other extra-organizational issues like social rapport and customer knowledge. Likewise, CRM success is poorly sketched and social rapport as a facilitator of knowledge generation has received little attention in the previous literature. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to investigate the role of CRM, customer knowledge and social rapport on CRM success. The present study considers the Resource-based view in developing CRM success framework. A Qualitative research approach has been taken in this study where ten customer-service managers of different telecom operators of Bangladesh have been interviewed. To identify the factors along with their associated variables and also to further develop a research model a content analysis technique has been utilized. The results of the interviews identified three factors affecting CRM success. This paper also highlights the research and managerial implications of the model.

Optimising future tropical roads

[Extract] Examining the economic benefits and environmental costs of roads in the Asia-Pacific

Optimizing roads to limit environmental damage and maximize societal development in the Asia-Pacific

[Extract] When thinking of threats to the environment roads are probably not at the top of many people's list. They should be. Road expansion is occurring at a frightening pace across the globe with projections by the International Energy Agency estimating more than 25 million kilometers of paved roads alone will be built by 2050. That is enough to encircle the entire planet more than 600 times! Approximately 90% of these roads will be built in developing tropical and subtropical regions; the epicenter of global biodiversity and the host of some of the planets most critical ecosystems. In the developing nations of Asia, for instance, in the next three years the total length of paved roads will double according to estimates by the Asian Development Bank. Part of this expansion will be as direct result of China's planned trillion dollars 'Belt and Road' and '21st Century Maritime Silk Road' projects which are expected to span more than 70 nations

Adaptive 3D facial action intensity estimation and emotion recognition

Automatic recognition of facial emotion has been widely studied for various computer vision tasks (e.g. health monitoring, driver state surveillance and personalized learning). Most existing facial emotion recognition systems, however, either have not fully considered subject-independent dynamic features or were limited to 2D models, thus are not robust enough for real-life recognition tasks with subject variation, head movement and illumination change. Moreover, there is also lack of systematic research on effective newly arrived novel emotion class detection. To address these challenges, we present a real-time 3D facial Action Unit (AU) intensity estimation and emotion recognition system. It automatically selects 16 motion-based facial feature sets using minimal-redundancy–maximal-relevance criterion based optimization and estimates the intensities of 16 diagnostic AUs using feedforward Neural Networks and Support Vector Regressors. We also propose a set of six novel adaptive ensemble classifiers for robust classification of the six basic emotions and the detection of newly arrived unseen novel emotion classes (emotions that are not included in the training set). A distance-based clustering and uncertainty measures of the base classifiers within each ensemble model are used to inform the novel class detection. Evaluated with the Bosphorus 3D database, the system has achieved the best performance of 0.071 overall Mean Squared Error (MSE) for AU intensity estimation using Support Vector Regressors, and 92.2% average accuracy for the recognition of the six basic emotions using the proposed ensemble classifiers. In comparison with other related work, our research outperforms other state-of-the-art research on 3D facial emotion recognition for the Bosphorus database. Moreover, in on-line real-time evaluation with real human subjects, the proposed system also shows superior real-time performance with 84% recognition accuracy and great flexibility and adaptation for newly arrived novel (e.g. ‘contempt’ which is not included in the six basic emotions) emotion detection

Optimizing future road infrastructure for societal benefit and environmental protection in Papua New Guinea

We are currently living in the most explosive era of infrastructure expansion in human history. By 2050, it is projected that there will be an additional 25 million kilometers of paved roads on Earth—enough to encircle the planet more than 600 times. Around nine‐tenths of these roads will be built in developing nations and tropical regions, which sustain many of the planet's most biologically diverse and environmentally importantecosystems. Unfortunately, the contemporary avalanche of new infrastructure is having severe impacts on many ecosystems and species. However, not all infrastructure is 'bad' for the environment. In appropriate contexts, new infrastructure can yield sizeable social and economic benefits with only limited environmental costs. For instance, road improvements in already‐settled areas can facilitate increases in agricultural production and improve rural livelihoods, by giving farmers better access to urban markets, fertilizers, and new agricultural technologies. Our team at James Cook University, Cairns are working in conjunction with researchers from the University of Papua New Guinea, the Papua New Guinean government and non‐government organizations to devise and implement spatial land‐use planning tools that will minimize the environmental costs and maximize the socioeconomic benefits of road expansion

Where are the hot spots of ecosystem services?

Ecosystem services (ES) are the bridge between nature and society, and are essential elements of any community's wellbeing. Australia is a place of diverse climates with a narrow band of wet tropics in Far North Queensland. The Wet Tropics is environmentally diverse, iconic in biodiversity, and supplies numerous ES influencing community wellbeing of this region, Australian national economy, and global climate change mitigation efforts. However ES in the Wet Tropics have rarely been assessed. We dealt with two questions: i) how are ES spatially distributed across the Wet Tropics, ii) where are the hot spots of ES production. We have classified the Wet Tropics forests into four types: coastal eucalypt forests and wood lands, coastal rainforests, eucalypts hills and ranges, and wet highland rainforests. Vegetation data metrics have been collected from 70 plots of 0.05 ha each located from coast to more than 1000m above msl. We have spatially assessed the ES in these forest types. We have found spatial congruence and differences of ES production across the forest types. Different forests types have produced different ES in higher quantity. Our study has revealed that hot spots of ES production are widely distributed across the different forests types in the Wet Tropics. Disturbance regimes (cyclones, forest fire) and conservation priority in management options have also influenced the usual spatial trend of ES production. This study shall be useful for decision makers to incorporate ES into their natural resource management planning, and for practitioners to evaluate areas identified with ES significance